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Modernism

Thursday, 19 August 2010

In the previous post, I called the transition from the scene at the firm to the one in Draper's hall a "wipe," but that's not quite right. The camera pans left into the wall:

But the second it succumbs to pure black, it bounces back to the right to place the viewer in the hall outside Draper's apartment:

I debated calling this a "manual wipe" before my better angels piped up, but now I'm not sure what to call this. (An artifact of an impending commercial break? Irony itself would get the vapors.) All of which is only to say that whatever this particular transition is called, it creates a continuity between Sterling Draper Cooper Pryce and the hall outside Draper's apartment. Why?

Most likely because Draper has finally decided that he will never be more than the professional persona he created. Not to sound my own trumpet, but my first attempt to understand the Peter/Peggy/Draper dynamic turned out to be largely correct: Peter and Peggy are headed into their respective futures, whereas Draper is slowly become solely an object of his own creation. His last link to Dick Whitman — Anna Draper, the wife of the man whose identify he stole — will be dead within months, at which point the only person who will that "Don Draper" deserves those quotation marks is his ex-wife. Soon he will be his creation, but instead of this moment marking the culmination of a lie or life self-fashioned, the result is as devestating to his personality as it was to his marriage.

If there were some way Draper could arrange a divorce from himself at this point, all indications are that he would: he deliberately sabotages the family-friendly Janzen campaign by presenting the company with the very sort of lascivious material they wanted no part of; he sleeps with his secretary then treats her in a way that invites retaliation; and he starts drinking alone. The vast quantities of alcohol consumed on the show serve a social function, and they continue to do so during working hours. But without a wife and a fiction to uphold, "working hours" for Draper consist of his entire waking life, as when he drinks alone in his apartment and watches his own commercials on television. He has become the man he created and is miserable.

Wednesday, 21 April 2010

As I'm currently trapped not only in England (by a volcano) but inside (by a rampaging cold), I thought I'd reconnect with the American political discourse I miss so much by reading a transcript of Sarah Palin's speech in Hamilton, Ontario last week. For a little under two hundred grand, some lucky Canadians were treated to some theater whose absurd circularity does Beckett proud. More on that in a moment, though, as I first want to make something absolutely clear: Sarah Palin does not scare me. No one whose speech twists into modernist thickets while ordering coffee counts as a worthy political opponent; but as she is a political force amongst people who think no sandbox is complete without a couple of blowtorches—the parenting equivalent of having her serve as Commander in Chief—I feel it my duty as an American to condense her Hamilton speech down to its Platonic essence:

This is such a melting pot. This is so beautiful. I love this diversity. There were a whole bunch of guys named "Tony" in the photo line.

It is so good to be here tonight. We'll kind of shift gears tonight. Having a conversation with so many of you is something that I look forward to. And not being so political tonight, I will talk a lot about energy, because I want to talk about some of the things that both our countries can do to ramp up production so that we can ramp up our economy, because the better our economies do, the better we do in terms of having opportunity to help children and those who are less fortunate, the better the rest of us do. We will talk a little bit about energy.

I'm wanting to kind of shift away from the political. The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the political and the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things. I was telling Todd, this is like on the the Vice Presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you get interviewed.

Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview. Obviously! Whenever we do something big in life, like a Vice Presidential campaign, I like to say a prayer about it. I need some divine inspiration and I need to remember what it really is all about, so that evening before the debate I remember being back stage and looking around for somebody to pray with, and looking around at the campaign staff and there's nobody to prayer with. Not that I would think that God would speak through me, but wanting to leave you with a little bit of inspiration and encouragement and maybe on a personal level have a conversation with you about some of the things that Todd and I have been through in the last year and a half, the last couple of years, that hopefully you can learn a couple of lessons from, because we've been through quite a few challenges, quite a few battles and you all too, everybody goes through battles, everybody has challenges. Some are played out in the newspapers, some of ours have been. Maybe yours have not been, but everybody has to make tough decisions and prioritize things in life and here we are tonight, given an opportunity to come together to reach out to help others, to help children, who are in need. We don't want to squander this opportunity, we want to be inspired and encourage and remember that though we all do go through some tough challenging times, we talked at the head table tonight that we need to be able to count our blessings, not our problems. We need to share our blessings, so we'll do a little bit about that tonight.

I pause to ask the pressing question: do any among you have any clue what this woman is talking about? Does she? My answer, as you might figure, is a vehement: "No, with thunder." She is making me uncomfortable with her words and what she says not because of their content, as they're free of that burden, but because of their form; or, more accurately, their formlessness. Nine hundred poor Canadians purchased $200 tickets to listen to the segue-free ramblings of a woman who forgets the subject of her sentence by the time she reaches the verb, then the verb by the time she reaches the object but keeps talking anyway. Such is, after all, the beauty of talking points: so long as you say them all, the coherence of the speech containing them is inconsequential. "Sound bites" are called "bites" instead of "meals" for a reason now.

Identity
is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself
except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe
yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not
of course really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so
very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you
cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound
right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.
You are of course never yourself.

The phrase "of course"
captures the central irony of all self-fashioning: we know, of course,
that we are more than the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves
about ourselves, and yet we only understand ourselves, and can only be
understood by others, through those stories. In case you ever wanted to
know why narrative diversity is important, there you have it: the more
narrative modes available, the more possible understandings of
themselves the people who encounter them can have.

This is self-fashioning at its most mundane, and in terms of Mad Men,
this is why Peggy Olson becomes more modern: once she understands
herself in terms of the upwardly mobile career-oriented woman, the
audience understands her frustrations in terms of the conflict between
that meritocratic fantasy and the realities of being a woman in a
male-dominated working environment. She becomes more recognizably
modern not because the world she inhabits does, but because the way she
responds to that changing world elicits a chorus of "of courses."

Neither
she nor Peter Campbell become "more real" as the series
progresses—fictional characters, being fictional, can only aspire to
escape the fictions they inhabit—but as the stories they tell
themselves about themselves in order to understand themselves come to
resemble ours, they'll seem more realistic because they're telling
themselves the same stories we tell ourselves and we, of course, live
in the real world. What I meant when I wrote the following, then, is
that Campbell is increasingly understanding himself in reference to the
same narratives we do, whereas Don Draper is not:

Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art,
and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma
Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent,
it was an act of literature, if you will, and much of the appeal of the
show is based on watching an inscrutable literary character interact
with actual humans.

Draper's self-fashioning is not
remotely this mundane—it is radical. He envisions himself not in the
way a person envisions his or her self, but in the way an author
envisions a character, which is why Joseph Kugelmass refers to it as aesthetic self-fashioning. To a certain extent, this is how my blog functions, i.e.
as a stylized version of the life I actually live and the person I
actually am; but because there are stories central to my conception of
myself that have not and will never make it on the blog, the person you
associate with my name will always feel, to me, like a persona. If withholding
certain core stories so alters the warp and woof of my persona that it
aestheticizes my self-fashioning, you can imagine what would happen
were I to start inventing those stories whole cloth à la Draper.

The
only people who know him on the show are the dead actors in his
increasingly frequent hallucinations, because only they have access to
his entire allotment of self-narratives—and, of course, they only have
that access because they are the stories he tells himself
about himself. The audience is privy to some of them, but not the
entire store, which is why Draper remains ever at a remove. To the
extent that Mad Men belongs to Draper, it is a story about
someone will never be able to integrate his stories with the ones he
wants told about him even to himself. His hallucinations
bully and hector him in order to remind him "that it does not sound
right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right,"
because the troubled antecedent of Stein's "it" is even more troubling
when the narratives that constitute identity are the convenient
inventions of an unsettled soul.

If this conception of self-fashioning seems less modern than modernist,
that would be my point: the manner in which Draper is integrating his
competing narratives into a semi-coherent sense of self is entirely
consonant with the modernist obsession with integrating competing
narratives into semi-coherent sense of self. From the unstable "I" in Samuel Beckett's trilogy to the endless renegotiation of familial roles in Joyce's Ulysses,
literary modernists sought to explode the tidy, reducible self that had
been the hallmark of literary realism. Draper is, then, something of an
exploded man sifting through bits of himself in search of the core to
which all these bits once belonged. However, until he accomplishes this
impossibility, his self-fashioning will still be far more aesthetic
than that of the other characters on Mad Men, and as such, the show's literate audience will still be drawn to him more than them.

I keep on meaning for these Mad Men posts to move beyond Draper so I can talk about Joan or visual rhetoric, but I can't quit Draper quite yet.

Friday, 15 January 2010

As I noted in the comments to this post, it was only a matter of time before I started Mad Men;
however, as I've studiously avoided reading about the show for the
better part of two years now, I'm not sure my insights into it will be
all that insightful. (Still, I'll soldier on, with the caveat that I'm
about to watch the eighth episode of the most recent season and would
rather not have it spoiled. Not, mind you, that I think it could be, as
the one of the defining features of the show is the thundering
predictability of its characters. That's not as an indictment of Matt
Weiner or his writing staff, merely an acknowledgment of the show's
central conceit: these are people who want to be left behind when the
rest of the world is raptured by history—at least at first.

Don
Draper and his fellows at Sterling-Cooper aggressively court their own
obsolescence by cultivating an aesthetic that appeals to inhabitants of
a disappearing culture. In this respect, focusing the show around the
Gatsby in the gray flannel suit is an inspired decision: Draper is a
man at a remove both from his own history and those of archetypes that
shape his character, and as such is constitutionally belated. He does
not believe in free love, like his beatnik paramour Midge Daniels, he
merely lacks a convincing moral objection to committing serial
adultery. His persona is a fashioned response to a vanishing culture,
and it appeals—both for the clients of Sterling-Cooper and viewers of
the show—to the perpetually recycled nostalgia for a time in which
romantic figures of powerful genius were recognized and compensated
accordingly. In the decades previous, as evidenced by an article Earnest Havemann wrote for Life in 1958, it had actually been true that

most
advertising agencies were started on the strength of one man's genius
and personality. These old giants of the business had an intuitive feel
for advertising. Flying strictly by the seat of their pants, they made
brilliant guesses as to what would put the public in the mood to buy
and planned brilliant campaigns around their hunches. Yesterday's ad
man used to take a look at the product, then go off in a corner to
dream up his campaign. Today's ad man sends for the research on what
consumers are thinking about at the moment and often goes out to size
up the consumer himself.

Havemann captures, in miniature,
why Peter Campbell's career will inevitably eclipse Draper's: a person
can only have hunches about cultures they know intimately, so the value
of a Don Draper is inversely proportional to, for example, market
penetration into urban black communities. This is not to say that
Campbell's attempt to identify the desires of black Americans at the
beginning of the Civil Rights Movement makes him any more sympathetic
as a character, or to viewers, as his commitment to equality is as
instrumental as Draper's is to free love.

Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art,
and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma
Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent,
it was an act of literature, if you will, and much of the appeal of the
show is based on watching an inscrutable literary character interact with actual
humans. Not literally, of course, but as the show moves forward in
time, the endgames of everyone except for Draper become
increasingly recognizable to the audience as modern types. We know why
the black elevator attendent is reluctant to talk to the white
advertising accountant. We know why the career woman is undermining
gender expectations by sleeping around. These characters are
commendable or revolting according to a familiar cultural logic
tempered by a little historical knowledge. We may not know precisely
how the story of Peggy Olson ends, for example, but we know what will
limit her ability to grow and how struggling against the stunt will
deform her, because hers is the thundering predictability of unwed
mothers and unfair office politics.

So Peter and Peggy are not
left behind because, over the course of two seasons, they learn to love
and accept modernity in their hearts. They still seek Draper's
approval, but they recognize that he's valuable in a way the world soon
stop valuing. When the rapture comes, they know Draper won't be
numbered among the chosen. They may not know why—Draper himself seems
ignorant—but they know. The key item, in this regard, is the note left
by the hitchhikers who dose and rob Draper:

In
an act of petty kindness, almost pity, they leave him behind with the
means to join them because they know he lacks the will to do so. They may not
have personally witnessed his days of the locust
in the second season, but like Peter and Peggy, they understand that he
will not be following them into the future. Nor, for that matter, will
Joan Holloway, whose related status I'll address in a future post
should you so desire.

Thursday, 17 December 2009

I am, most likely, the only person on earth currently taking a break from the serious work of reading and writing about comics by reading a novel whose cover declares that it "only [could] have been devised by a literary team fielding the Marquis de Sade,
Arthur Edward Waite, Sir James Frazer, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky,
C.G.Jung, Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka." But because academics are not allowed to take vacations, the world reminds them of what they should be doing at all times—the idea being that if you can make words, you must be making them count.

I thought that this Higher Nagging would absent itself from my current project, but clearly I was wrong. There I was yesterday, next to a stack of unread comics, and because I had the temerity to be reading a thick late-modernist novel ...

"I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted. I had no aptitude with the rifle. I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly. But I was considered 'sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast. So I was selected as company runner, which meant I was also a kind of servant, I forget the word ..."

"Batman!"

"That is it." (123)

Which is precisely what I was thinking (albeit with a bit more bluster) as I hurled the book across the room.

Monday, 19 October 2009

I'm presently torn between two alternative means of interpreting the uninterpretable. Because I'm a lit-git, I'm tempted to go with the unscientific advice Gertrude Stein belatedly offered her mentor William James:

[Y]ou do not really believe yourself why should you,
you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be
yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right
it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because
it is not right.

That I'm the sole source of that seminal articulation of the grit that chokes the gears of our cognitive grind to a halt is a national tragedy . . . because how are there no modernists whose Steinian veins have bled out and into Google more stainingly than mine? (I'm not even a modernist anymore you know.) Now where was I?

I do not really believe myself why should I, I know so well that it is not myself, it could not be myself because I cannot remember right and if I do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.

It is. Jonathan's story of seeing a pink bow in a black-and-white cartoon is a poignant funny that also happens to be relevant, as I'm currently seeing things that I couldn't have seen, e.g. I remember seeing the car slam into the semi's trailer even though, as I mentioned in the original post, the fog was so thick I couldn't even see the semi once it passed me. So why do I think I saw what I couldn't have seen?

My brain did the math. It calculated what must have happened between the time I last saw the car in my mirror and where it landed and then turned that understanding of what must have happened into a memory of having witnessed it happen. So even though I couldn't have seen the crash occur, I'm burdened by a nightmare-inducing memory of it. Intellectually, I know this to be the result of garden-variety non-pathological confabulation, indicative of nothing more than the procedural drills required to produce an unbroken experience of consciousness; emotionally and ethically, however, it feels wrong to bear witness to a tragedy that I did not, in fact, witness.

Put differently: I know my eyes have two blind spots (punctum caecum) because there are no rods and cones where the optic nerve exits the eye and that the brain fills in details to occupy that absence; however, I've never felt betrayed by this perceptual white lie before, or that there was anything ethically dubious to the claim that I "saw" something that was actually in a blind spot. My brain behaved no differently in reconstructing my memory of the crash than it does when it allows me to experience an unbroken field of vision, yet there does seem to be something ethically dubious about its behavior here. Moreover, the fact that it performed this reconstruction in order to torment my sleep with visions of it strikes me as an appalling cosmi-cognitive joke.

*Had he been less concerned that his words accord with the dictates of English, I don't doubt that Jonathan would've embraced his inner lesbian modernist and went with the impactively tacky "Memory is a funny" over that grammatical sentence he actually wrote.

Thursday, 23 April 2009

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me. They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary. I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary. So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized. Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what?

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation. Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward. When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades. Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan. It took three months to arrive. Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington(1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in. Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan. Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background.

Are those novels good? No. Do they deserve canonization? No. Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular? Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time? Is that not a viable object of study? Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical?

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility). So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs. To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge. An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating. No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last. I did that on purpose. Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like. ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.) From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this. Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos. But remember:

Verisimilitude is not an end. It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means. What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text. For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text. Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this. Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care? Is it because Before Adam was written by London? Because he wrote it a century ago? Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

Monday, 13 April 2009

On this day
in history, two men—one of whom would say that the other’s life work
represented “the utmost human degradation[:] an idiot’s vegetative
existence”—were born. In 1885, the author of that statement, Marxist
literary critic Georg Lukács, dewombed in Budapest. Often cited as the
founder of Western (or philosophical) Marxism, Lukács can be considered
the grandfather of the armchair academic activists who fought the
radical fight from tenured positions at illustrious institutions. I
only half-kid here: his claim in The Historical Novel (1937) that the role of the literary critic was to examine “the relation between ideology (in the sense of Weltanschauung) and artistic creation” (147)
allowed otherwise sedentary scholars to label as revolutionary action
an exegesis on Dickensian realism. Anyone whose work analyzed critical
or socialist realism, i.e. literature which displayed “the
contradictions within society and within the individual context of a
dialectical unity,” could consider him or herself a soldier in the
Great Class War Against Mystification. Like Susan Sontag,
I find his definition of realism—socialist, critical or
otherwise—unnecessarily reductive and his dismissiveness of non-realist
works short-sighted (if not out-right anti-intellectual).

In 1906, the same year Lukács received his Ph.D., was born the man
whose work depicted “an idiot’s vegetative existence.” That Samuel
Beckett’s novels, plays and poetry trafficked in “human degradation”
was reason enough for condemnation: unlike realists novels, which were
capable of creating dialectical conversations between singular
narratives and the social totality of history, modernist novels
wallowed in the singularity of their narrators:

Lack of objectivity in the description of the outer
world finds its complement in the reduction of reality to a nightmare.
Beckett’s Molloy is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this development. (152)

If an author grounds that nightmare in “the Aristotelian concept of man as zoon politikon” (151);
that is, if an author provides a reference against which the
consequences of the actions of social animals can be judged: only then
can reader or critic differentiate between the concrete potentialities
(what happens) and the abstract potentialities (what the character
thought could have happened). Authors who refuse to declare what
happened—who mess in the pseudo-realization of abstract
potentiality—create readers who will never know from dialectical. They
will not be social animals critically examining the societal
structuring of their lives through the power of realist narratives;
they will be unwitting dupes forever mired in the pathological
subjectivity of Molloy, forever sucking pebbles. Their lives, such that they are, will be spent in the Grand Hotel Abyss, which Lukács describes as

a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the
edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily
contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic
entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts
offered. (qtd. 22)

Needless to say, I disagree.

I’ll close on an historical odditiy: not only was Lukács born on
April 13th, so too was the French psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic
theorist, Jacques Lacan. It’s as if the day conspired to give birth to
the thought of Louis Althusser (which, as you can probably guess, is
one part Lukácian, one part Lacanian and three cans of crazy).

The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:

Theron enjoys the "primitive" pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it's orderly, from internal is primitive

If only I knew the antecedent of "it" I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?)
(x-posted.)

*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)." How's that for passive-aggression?

Friday, 20 June 2008

Scott McLemee may bite his thumb at Valentin Temkine, the French schoolteacher who claims to have cracked the Godot code, but I think he’s onto something:

Godot, whom Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for, is a
Resistance smuggler, who is supposed to smuggle them out of occupied
France into the Italian zone. The two of them are Jews on the run who
come from Paris’ 11 arrondissement. They are probably waiting
to be rescued in the spring of 1943 on the dry, limestone heights of
the Southern Alps, somewhere like the Plateau de Valensole.

My French is terrible, but here, roughly, is what Temkine says:

Waiting for Godot is very nearly a fable of the
occupation. People sleep in ditches and aren’t surprised to be beaten.
A man and his servant, laden with possessions, are in flight from
somewhere to somewhere. Everything was different “a million years ago,
in the nineties.” And two people are to meet a third whom they know
only by a single name, a code-name as it were; they don’t know why
they’re to meet him, but it matters. If the assignation fails they’re
to try again in 24 hours, meanwhile hanging about as inconspicuously as
possible. It takes little insight to recognize details from some tale
about Resistance groups[.]

Like I said, my French is terrible … which is why I quoted Hugh Kenner recapitulating the argument he first made in 1973’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. Few understand the compulsion to “make it new” better than Kenner—his best work embodies the ethos it describes—but enlivening moribund themes, forms or arguments entails more than mere repetition.

Because, as we all know, repetition breeds zombies. (The
unenlivened dead arise, chase away the interlopers and hold mandatory
office hours, &c.) Grouse away about Google eating brains, it should have a beneficial effect on the duplication of scholarly arguments. See?

[I planned on writing about someone declaring they can prove Homer was a woman, complete with links to Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), but it turns out someone has already staked claim
on my insufficiently absurd example. I'm not
sure whether I feel chastened or depressed, but I do know that I don't
know how to finish this post now. I should just stop. I can't go on.
I'll go on. Or not.]

finishing a related article on book-events and the (hopelessly busted) professional reviewing apparatus, and

polishing the London chapter while researching the Wharton (as per my afore-posted itinerary).

Posting for the next few weeks will, of necessity, be related to one of those itemized adventures ... but that doesn't mean we can't keep things lively. Take tonight, for example. I could've posted some extremely dull noodling about Jack London, telic action, and collective stupidity, but I didn't. Why?

Because that would be boring. Instead, I present to you one of the paragraphs from the article on book-events. Not because I'm particularly proud of it. Just the opposite, in fact. I'm extremely unhappy with it in all its many, many iterations. So I ask for your assistance. The point is that I want this to be as terribly accurate as possible ... only when I'm accurate, the passage is needlessly, tediously, soporifically overlong. Too many words and it becomes a disposable complaint; too few, a cryptic, unjust grievance. I need to squeeze more terrible into fewer sentences, and I ask for your assistance in this. Here is what I have:

Consider the life of the average scholarly monograph. At first no more than a glimmer in the mind of a graduate student preparing for her qualifying exams, over the next three years it becomes something more. Chapters are polished and delivered to the disciplinary flagships—ELH, American Literature, Critical Inquiry—then to their period escorts—Nineteenth Century Literature, Twentienth Century Literature, Postmodern Culture—before landing in the holds of the undead authors—The James Joyce Quarterly, The Henry James Review, &c. A few respectable publications to her name, the reversion from independent articles to interdependent chapters begins. Large sections are reconceptualized in an effort to create a manuscript more representative of the sum of its parts. Years devoted to tinkering and conceptualizing, razing and reconceptualizing, rebuilding and resubmitting pass. Seven, perhaps eight years after winking into existence, her monograph is accepted by one of the few remaining reputable scholarly publishers. More corrections are made. Covers are designed and approved. Permissions are obtained. Ten, perhaps eleven years later, she holds her monograph in her hands. Friends and mentors who have already read it receive copies, as do the very journals which rejected parts of it years earlier. Her colleagues congratulate her—a raise is imminent, tenure now seems assured—but make little effort to read it. They have their own books to write. She moves on to her next project, and the process begins anew. Then, three years later, she finds evidence that someone other than herself has read her book: a 250-word review tucked away in the back of an academic journal. The review never engages her argument; neither praises nor condemns; and betrays little evidence of the reviewer having made it past the introduction. To paraphrase one of the great nineteenth century novelists, over the next few weeks she will acquire a passionate resistance to the confession that she had achieved nothing.

The next paragraph identifies the author (George Eliot), the work responsible for this manifestation of scholarly despair (Casaubon's The Key to All Mythologies) and says something clever. But I want to emphasize the horror that typically accompanies the publication of a scholarly manuscript—especially that first one—so that I might unfavorably compare it to the blessing that is one of our much-desired book-events. So please, tell me, what indignity have I missed? What crushing disappointment have I overestimated? How can I improve this paragraph?

Tuesday, 10 April 2007

No, you won’t find—especially when he’s reading his own work. Be warned, however, as he does do the police in different voices. His reading of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1939 sounds like his answer to Joyce’s reading of Finnegans Wake,
right down to the exaggerated (and, in Pound’s case, affected) Irish
accent. Listen to how Joyce reads the line “a man and his bride
embraced between them” and tell me he doesn’t ham it up. (You can
try. I won’t listen.) The Joyce reading is from the ALP section of the
Wake, and the text he reads is transcribed here.